Outdoor Projection at Classic Car Night at the Port Elmsley Drive-In

Twilight at the Outdoor Cinema

Inside the long, tall and narrow structure that fronts the large screen at the Port Elmsley Drive-In, a half-century’s worth of discarded equipment and other abandoned paraphernalia trace the rise and fall of outdoor cinema. Old projectors and lenses collect dust alongside a half-metre-tall pile of metal speakers, the latter rendered mute once soundtracks could be piped directly into cars via AM and FM transmitters. There is even a pair of car doors back there, as if someone had been building a museum exhibit before finally deserting the project. A leaning weathered sign invites patrons to the “refreshment centre” and “children’s playground.” Rusted octagonal film cases reveal movies, now ruined by years of moisture, that were never returned — although one can’t help but think that by taking the 1970 comedy-western Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County, starring Dan Blocker, Nanette Fabray, Jim Backus and Wally Cox, out of circulation, someone was doing the movie-going world an unintended favour.

Even the screen itself — whitewashed cinder block for the bottom two-thirds and wood and stucco after that — points to a particular place on Hollywood’s time line: you can see where it was widened by more than two metres on either side to accommodate the switch in 1953 to the wide-screen CinemaScope format.

A casual remark by Dave Bird, who with his wife, Allison, bought Port Elmsley’s only movie screen three years ago, inadvertently reveals the condition of today’s drive-in industry.

“This is state-of-the-art 1979,” he says.

Indeed, drive-ins have enjoyed few, if any, technological leaps since then, as the industry that began in New Jersey in 1933 and peaked in North America in the late 1950s and early ’60s has been reduced to a steady shadow of its once robust self.

Drive-ins celebrated their 75th anniversary last summer, and it’s been 60 years since they first appeared in Ottawa, as the Star-Top Drive-In on Cyrville Road, the Auto-Sky at Fisher and Baseline, the Aladdin on Albion Road and the Britannia, on Carling Avenue, all opened their virtual doors around 1949, followed in later years by the Airport and Queensway drive-ins.

One by one, though, they shuttered and closed, starting with the Auto-Sky in 1981. The total purge was completed in 1996 when the Britannia was razed to make way for the 12-screen Coliseum complex. (One drive-in remains nearby — Gatineau’s Cine-Parc Templeton, which opened in 1990, shows movies in French and English on its two screens.)

Declining numbers of customers had often been cited as the reason for this mass extinction, and our long and cold winters haven’t helped matters. But in many cases, urban sprawl and the attendant rise in property values simply made outdoor theatres far less commercially attractive than indoor shopping malls.

“I think drive-ins generally ran out of owners before they ran out of customers,” says Bird, who counters the notion that the death of the drive-in was inevitable and natural. The Port Elmsley Drive-In, located between Smiths Falls and Perth and with a capacity for upwards of 350 cars, is doing fine, he says, even with the wretched weather this summer. In fact, he notes the drive-in has attracted many campers this season precisely because of the weather — “they just want to get out of their wet tents for a while.”

Absent, though, is the rampant sex and alcohol use that once made drive-ins unpopular with just about everyone other than teens — “passion pit” was a commonly heard description, and the reason they were banned in Quebec until 1967. Back in the day, says Bird, you’d pick up a couple of cases of empties at the end of every night. Now, it takes all summer to collect as many. “And it’s not the teens,” he says, citing an elderly couple who recently smuggled two bottles of Corona into the drive-in, at the end of the night leaving the empties standing neatly by the metal post that once held the speakers.

(In the projection room, meanwhile, a bra hangs from the ceiling, a keepsake found on the first night he and his wife ran the drive-in and one of the few souvenirs they’ve found that suggest patrons there have been doing anything but watching movies.)

Otherwise, the drive-in hasn’t much changed.

The exploitation films of the 1970s have disappeared, and first-run films are now shown at drive-ins at the same time that cineplexes get them, and not weeks later as was formerly the custom.

The refreshment centre is still open, selling popcorn, soft drinks, cotton candy and hot dogs “the way you like ‘em.”

And at nine dollars per adult and two bucks for kids (10 and five at CineParc Templeton) — for two movies — a night at the drive-in is still cheaper than the cost of a babysitter.

Even the swings and slide at the children’s playground are still there, beckoning kids with a diversion while they wait for the skies to darken and the stars to come out.

By Bruce Deachman
Source: http://alkaralar.cn/834841-Projectors-for-Different-Occasions.html